Who She Is
by Lemniscate35173
Summary: Living without a past can be hard. "They tell her her name is Hermione. She doesn't know if that is what her name was, or is, but it feels right rolling off her tongue and she responds to it easily."


**I don't own Harry Potter.**

**For Round One of the Test Your Limits Competition on HPFC. Prompt: memories.**

**7/16/14: Just some small edits.**

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They place her at St. Mungo's. They were hesitant to do it at first, but as days turned into weeks and weeks turned into months with no sort of improvement, they finally admitted defeat and put her in the hospital.

She knows who they are, but at the same time, she doesn't. She knows their names, she knows what they look like. She knows that Harry has black hair and green eyes. She knows that Mrs. Weasley has red hair that is threaded with grey, even more so now, and a plump figure that could be described as motherly. She knows that Ron is tall and lanky with flaming red hair that is almost blinding in certain lights; she wonders if Mrs. Weasley once had hair like that.

She doesn't know much else about them. She doesn't know why they are taking care of her. She doesn't know how she knows them. She doesn't know why she should trust them, nor does she knows why they trust her. She just knows what they decide to tell her, sometimes everything they can think of, other times nothing at all. Or at least that is what she thinks.

They tell her her name is Hermione. She doesn't know if that is what her name was, or is, but it feels right rolling off her tongue and she responds to it easily. They also give her a stick, and tell her it is her wand. The first time they give it to her, she doesn't believe them, and she watches as their faces, previously filled with some sort of hope, fall.

The second time, a boy without an ear comes in and forces the stick into her hand. He seems angry about something, and maybe a little sad too. They don't tell her what his name is, and she doesn't see him again for a long time. She still refuses to call the stick a wand, but she sleeps with it under her pillow at night. The first few times they see her fiddling with her stick, their faces get hopeful. They still encourage her to use her stick, but they have apparently stopped looking for whatever they were looking for to happen when she uses her stick.

She stays at a room in Mrs. Weasley's house. They tell her the house is called the Burrow, and their faces are alight with hope. They fall like always when the thing, as she has started calling it, doesn't happen. Their faces used to light up with hope a lot. It is rare now.

Hermione doesn't know whether she actually wants the thing to happen. She knows it would make Mrs. Weasley and Ron and Harry all so happy to see it happen. At the same time, she is kind of afraid of it happening; from what she can gather through the thin walls, the thing would change her a lot. She isn't sure if she wants to change, even if now she has no idea who she is.

She knows that they are putting her in St. Mungo's before they tell her. She is wont to wake up one or two hours after she has fallen asleep. She thinks she didn't used to do that, because the first time she did it they all looked surprised, and they still haven't gotten quite used to it. Usually she goes back to bed, but sometimes she wanders the house.

It is on one of those nights she hears them talking. She pauses on the stairs when she hears voices that don't belong to Harry, Ron or the other various house residents. She doesn't hear much, and doesn't dare move closer due to the stairs' tendency to creak. She ducks her head down quickly, when the voices are reaching levels that will easily mask her presence.

Harry, Ron and Mrs. Weasley are there, as well as the other residents of the house. There are other various people with the same flaming red hair as Ron, and even more people of non-flaming hair colors adding in their piece as well. The overall effect makes her want to go back up stairs and take some of the vile tasting concoction that Mrs. Weasley gives her when she complains of headaches.

The one-eared boy is there as well. He is sitting off to the side, but his voice still occasionally chimes in. The anger and the sadness are still there too, though the sadness seems to be almost masking the anger that is there. He looks up, straight at her, and she freezes. She expects him to make her go back to bed, stop the conversation so that she will not hear anymore, but he just raises a finger to his lips in a stay quiet gesture, with a bit of a sad smile on his face.

Three days later they tell her they are taking her to the hospital, St. Mungo's. She only asks who St. Mungo was, and what he did to deserve a hospital. The other questions that float around her mind are much harder to answer, and she isn't quite certain if she wants to know herself.

They take her to the hospital. At first, she is put in a short-term ward. The nurses, which she refuses to call Medi-Witches because they are just nurses with funny sticks, are confident that she will be back to normal in a jiffy. Her wards become more and more permanent as more and more test and remedies fail.

Finally, they tell Mrs. Weasley that they are moving her to the long-term ward. Predictably, Mrs. Weasley puts up a big fuss. This time though, she is serious. There is a meeting held in her room, with lots of the same people as the one she had spied on, and they debate the pros and cons of taking her out of the hospital. It only stops when Hermione opens her mouth and says she will go to the long-term ward without question that the commotion stops.

They think it over and no one was happy with that solution, but they all agreed upon it, so there it is. Hermione resists the urge to point out that she is the one who is actually going to the ward, but it seems ungrateful. Out of the corner of her eye, she thinks she sees the boy without an ear smile.

Her move to the long-term ward, despite all the drama it caused, goes without much incident. Her neighbors are odd ones, and the nurses stop trying to treat her with much respect until she shows them that she is indeed not a vegetable. There is a man in the bed next to her who spends his time asking her if she wants an autograph, and he keeps pestering he until she requests to be moved. It is more peaceful without him, and it is definitely worth the disappointed looks she gets when her caretakers find out she has requested the move.

A few weeks after the move, the boy missing an ear comes to visit. Mrs. Weasley, Harry and Ron all watch from the corner. He introduces himself as George, and when she doesn't show any recognition, the trio watching from the corner deflate. Hermione doesn't tell them they were riding on a false hope, whatever it was. They talk about nothing in particular, and when he leaves she is not sad.

The next few visits are almost the same, though the number of escorts is reduced to two, and then one. She notices that George, though she still finds herself calling him the boy with one ear or variations of the sort, is half watching the escort out of the corner of his eye.

After six visits, the escorts stop coming. She didn't look forward to George's visits, because he seemed boring. He talked only of neutral things, like the weather or the room. Never did he talk about his life, or ask about hers.

The sixth visit changed things. With no escort, George was freer. He asked her about her life, and talked about his. Soon enough, she was telling him about her lack of memories, and all that it carried. She told him about the thing and the false hope that lit up their eyes. She told him about being treated almost like a child, and not even being sure if she was much higher than one. Lastly, she told him about her questions.

They spilled out in a torrent. She had started at the beginning of visiting hours, because George came in the morning, but by the end of visiting hours, when the sun had started to set, she still hadn't finished. George had come the next day too, and although she wasn't done when his normal visiting time ended, she forced him out. He looked like he would have stayed longer, but she knew he was needed at his shop. The downsides of him telling her about his life.

She finally finished halfway through the next visit. He had come the next day as well, even though he usually only came once or twice a week. When she finally finished he didn't say much, only sitting there with a look that she couldn't quite disconcert.

He left, even though visiting hours weren't over, and his normal visiting time hadn't ended. The next day, he came again. Hermione started to wonder if maybe these visits were interfering with his life, but she didn't want to ask.

George didn't talk. He sat in the chair he usually sat in with his hand on his chin, and an odd look in his eye. She was too afraid to break the silence. It stretched, until he finally asked her if she really wanted to know the answers to her questions.

She didn't have to think about her answer, and he knew that too. As soon as the words were out of her mouth, they started coming out of his.

She wouldn't have believed half of what he said if it wasn't him. He talked about flying cars and magic stones and all other things that she didn't think could be real. She thought he sounded like he was reading out of an adventure book.

He started coming everyday, regularly. They also gradually started staying longer and longer, until the nurse who fed sleeping potions to the patients that needed them resorted to whacking him over the head with a caldron to get him out. That nurse was fired the following week, when they realized she wasn't fit to be around people of their mental state. Hermione tried not to be too offended. When she told this to George, he just laughed and rubbed the spot on his head where he got hit, but she thought she saw something else flicker across his face.

When she finally worked up the courage to ask him if these visits were effecting his shop, he just laughed and said business was booming. He didn't say anything else about it, and when Harry came to visit the next week, she asked him about the shop. He looked a bit confused, maybe a but hopeful, and told her the store was doing fine.

George continued to tell the tale, though it was interrupted by bit of conversation before and after. She didn't try to interrupt when he was talking, and she thought that was a good thing. He looked like if she tried to stop him, he wouldn't be able to start up.

When George tells her about his fourth year, because she really can't think of it as her second year when she can't even remember it, she remembers. Not like Harry or Ron or Mrs. Weasley would like her to remember, what she has now termed the old days, but the man who used to bug her about autographs, who she now knows is Gilderoy Lockhart. It is hard to think of that man as a teacher, but then again, it is hard to think of him as having the same ailment as her. While she just had a gap in her mind, no past, just the present, she was still able to function. That man was a not much better than a vegetable, worse than a little kid.

After that, she asks to see the doctor in charge of her care. The nurses don't seem to understand what she is saying, until another nurse who was passing by hears the commotion and explains what a doctor is. Hermione thanks her, and she gets a smile in return.

The smile drops when the doctor in charge of her care turns out to be incompetent. The tests have stopped, no one is researching. She is essentially just waiting to die in this ward.

She tells George about this the next day. His look turns dark for a second, before it turns back to normal, not exactly sad but not exactly cheerful either. He continues on with the story that is her life, and she almost forgets the look. Next week, a new doctor comes in, and he listens to what she has to say before carefully outlining what he hopes will be a plan for her recovery. She doesn't hope, but she does see the world a little bit brighter for the next few days.

George keeps asking her about her life, but she no longer goes on and on about the inner workings of St. Mungo's and what goes on in her head. Instead she tells him about the drama between nurses and what has happened to the other patients while he was gone, because he is probably the most exciting part of her life.

She doesn't tell him about how the research is going either. That is something that is becoming increasingly more private as time goes on, as Harry and Ron and Mrs. Weasley start loosing interest in the hospitalized girl that used to be their friend. To be fair, she knew they would always care for her, but their visits were becoming more infrequent, and the time shorter and shorter.

As George gets farther and farther into his telling, she starts getting them. They are short moments of remembering, never big details, just little things like wondering if Ginny finally relented and started learning that spell Mrs. Weasley wanted her to learn, or thinking she should find those earrings Ron got her.

She never remembers what she remembers, but she can remember the short sensation of remembering, and that is enough to both frighten and exhilarate her. She borrows a dictionary one day, without bothering to wonder why there was a dictionary floating around in a hospital; she has excepted that this world thought backwards was forwards and forwards was sideways when it comes to things like common sense. She decides her memories are ephemeral, or perhaps transitory.

She tells George about them first. She knows he will not try to make her remember more, and her doesn't. She also gets the feeling that their little story time session wouldn't be allowed if anyone beyond the nurses knew.

After the storytelling is done, the glimpses keep happening, but in no more or less frequency. She tells the doctor. He thinks it is a breakthrough, but she thinks otherwise.

She tells George her suspicions. He tells her to just do what she thinks is right. Perhaps other people would have been upset at the vague answer. She wasn't.

She decides she will stay in the hospital for one more year. She has already been in this ward for two years, and nothing has been done. She now knows she is a war hero. If something could be done beyond her quick flashes, it would have been done.

He agrees with her, and she knows it is true agreement, not some sort of way to appease her. He offers to let her stay with him and Angelina. He tells her she would be a help with the baby on the way, and Angelina agrees. She accepts, because she knows he isn't lying.

The two years pass. George still comes everyday, thought the visits are shorter now that he has run out of the past. Still, she enjoys herself just as much as she did on that sixth visit.

The row that erupts when she says she is leaving proves the Weasley temper matches the Weasley hair color, and doesn't stop until she points out that while she might not have her memories, they weren't her guardians. She could take care of herself and do as she wished. He had only stayed in the ward because she believed that it could get her memories back, but it did not.

She doesn't stay to hear the reactions of the people that cared for her. She leaves the hospital, her discharge papers having been prepared by the doctor beforehand, and goes to where George is waiting outside with a very pregnant Angelina.

She and Angelina hit it off. She does what Angelina can't do, and it is refreshing to talk to another woman as an equal, not a patient or thing to be pitied. When the baby comes, she is waiting outside the door as Angelina curses and groans.

One night, when she is putting the baby down in it's crib, she realizes that the glimpses don't bother her anymore. She hasn't forgotten that feeling, but she simply doesn't care about it anymore. She is who she is now. That was her past, this is her future, and she doesn't think she would have it any other way. If she would, well, there's nothing she can do about it now.

She realizes that there are people who would rather have her elsewhere. She realizes just about everyone except for George, Angelina and herself want her somewhere different, but with George was where she was happy. She tells them this and no one was happy with that solution, but they all agreed upon it, so there it is.


End file.
